Chaneysville Incident (25 page)

I stared at her. Not because of what she was saying—she was perfectly capable of saying anything if she thought it would help her get what she wanted—but because she meant it. I could tell from her body; she had somehow drawn herself together, like a caterpillar near a flame.

“The Hill’s dead, Johnny,” she said. “I didn’t mind making twenty phone calls. I minded that there were only twenty to make, and half of them were outside of town. You know, we don’t even ring the church bell anymore—hardly anybody lives close enough to hear it. We don’t have a Sunday school anymore, because there aren’t any young children to come to it. There aren’t enough people to have fights at quarterly conference. We wouldn’t even have a preacher if Reverend Williams hadn’t come to work at the shoe factory. There’s not enough work for young people, and not enough young people, and they move away….” She stopped suddenly, straightened, stepped away from the window, went to the stove and turned on the broiler. “Dinner’ll be ready in a few minutes,” she said. She went to the refrigerator and took out a jar of mayonnaise, came back to the counter and began to mix it into the salad.

I came the rest of the way down the steps and sat down at the table, watching her. I realized that I had not seen her in a long time; years. And that I had made a stupid assumption: that she would not have changed. In most ways she had not. And yet there was something different about her. I wondered what it could be, what could have caused it, what it would mean. I knew it would not mean that much; it couldn’t because she was doing the same old things. Or had been. I watched her mix mayonnaise into the salad, knowing she hated mayonnaise, knowing she knew I hated mayonnaise, and I wondered.

I was still wondering when she had set the meal before me: a slab of fresh prime round steak, broiled medium-well; a potato baked until the meat was soft and fleshy, with a pat of hand-churned butter inserted when the potato was not yet done, so that the flesh was a golden yellow throughout; a loaf of bread, fresh-baked, and beside it a pound chunk of the sweet butter, warmed until it was soft enough to spread. The salad was not as perfect as the rest, but Italian tomatoes, Bermuda onions, and romaine lettuce are not common to the northern Appalachian region in March; she had done well to find them at all, and they were, to be fair, fresh enough. It was a superb meal. The result of much effort and not inconsiderable expense, and a high degree of concern. It was an expression of something—of a desire for some kind of reconciliation, perhaps even of love. Or so one would have thought just from looking at it, without knowing the history of it. But I did know that history, and so I could recognize it as another one of her little stratagems, or part of one; an emotional pincers movement devised to encircle the unwary. Well, I was wary. But I did not know what the objective was.

“I hope you’re hungry,” she said, as she set the food before me. As she sat down across from me, behind a cheaper cut of meat, a smaller potato. Her voice seemed higher than usual. “Did you have anything to eat today?”

“No,” I said. “I slept.”

“Good,” she said. “You’re hungry then.”

“I’m hungry,” I said. Warily. She was planning something. And the meal was central to it; she wanted me to eat it. She seemed to want me to
like
it. I didn’t understand it at all.

“Did you sleep well?”

“Fine,” I said. “I slept just fine.” I took a bite of the steak. It was tender and full of flavor, but it was done too well for me—I like mine rare. “How was work?”

“Real good. Busy, but not too busy. You know. Is your steak all right?”

“It’s fine,” I said.

“It’s not too rare, is it?”

“No, it’s fine.”

“I could put it back in for a minute….”

“It’s fine. Perfect. Wonderful. Dandy.
Okay
?”

She didn’t say anything, just looked hurt and chewed her food. I ate silently then too, chewing the steak, slicing at the potato, pecking cautiously at the salad, trying to get as little of the mayonnaise as possible, trying to figure it out. She had gone to a lot of trouble to prepare a favorite meal, and there had to be a reason, and it had to be a strange reason. Because it was not my favorite meal. It was Bill’s.

“That’s Hellman’s on the salad,” she said.

“I know,” I said.

“John, I called the insurance. Or I tried to; the company’s out of business.”

“You tell Cohen not to worry about getting paid. I’ll write him a check before I leave.”

“You don’t have to; Mr. Scott said he’d be happy to pay for it.”

I looked up at her. “You know what to tell him about that.”

“John, he only wants—”

“You know what to tell him about that.”

“All he wants—”

“I don’t give a damn what
he
wants. He turned Bill’s funeral into a Goddamned three-ring circus, and he’s not going to do it again. You tell him to take his money and use it for a suppository.”

“How’s your potato?” she said.

“What?”

“Your potato. It’s not too firm, is it?”

“No,” I said, “no, it’s just perfect.”

“Oh,” she said, getting up suddenly. “I forgot.” She went to the refrigerator, came back carrying a pint of sour cream. “Here,” she said. She opened the container and put it before me, and then resumed her seat. “You have to bury things sometime, John,” she said. “All right, you think what he did about Bill was wrong. He didn’t think so….”

“He still doesn’t,” I said.

“All right, maybe he doesn’t. But that’s not a reason to keep him from doing what
is
right.”

“Nothing that bastard wants to do is right,” I said. I sounded angry, and I was angry, but mostly I was confused. Because the moves made perfect sense for her—a frontal attack with the steak and baked and tossed, and when the main source of resistance had been encountered, dig in and bring up the sour cream. What didn’t make sense was the fact that it was Bill’s meal, and she expected me to eat it and then give in to Scott.

“At least talk to him about it. Talk to him.”

That
was it.

“What the
hell
do I want to talk to Scott for?”

She didn’t say anything; she just reached for the spoon and the sour cream and started to ladle it onto my potato. I reached out and stopped her. “I don’t want any of that,” I said.

“What?”

“I don’t want any of that. I don’t like sour cream.”

“Why, John, you always loved sour—” She stopped. Looked at the sour cream, then at me.

“Oh, my God,” she said.

And then I realized how simple the explanation was, how simple and how unthinkable: she had made a mistake. She had calculated her strategy perfectly, but she had made the wrong meal—or she had thought she was cooking for the wrong son. It was almost funny. I let go of her hand, watched it drop lifelessly to the table. “I
hate
sour cream,” I told her. “I hate mayonnaise too.”

Suddenly, for the first time I could recall, she looked old. Her cheeks formed little pouches, and her mouth seemed just a little loose. But she picked up the spoon. “Then I’ll have some,” she said.

“You hate sour cream too,” I said.

But she paid no attention, and smeared it all over her potato. She took two bites, her eyes staring at me, hard and defiant. And then she stood up quickly and turned and mounted the stairs. I heard her steps as she walked into her bedroom, the creak of springs as she lay across the bed. And then there were smaller creaks; her body was shaking.

I listened to them for long minutes before I pushed the carcass of the meal away from me and mounted partway up the stairs. She heard me coming; the creakings stopped.

“All right,” I said, keeping my voice soft, but knowing she would hear. “All right. I’ll go and see the bastard.” I had turned and gone back down the stairs then, to get out the pot and brew the coffee.

The average commentator on the manners, mores, politics, and structure of society is, as a rule, too easily confused by the trappings of power. He assumes, for example, that a man’s influence is indicated by his position, or his wealth, or his connections in business, completely ignoring—or choosing to ignore, for reasons of hypocrisy or deception—the awesome effect of tennis and bridge partnerships, school groups, marriages, clandestine affairs, and the interpersonal bonds forged by mutual experience. He is even more confused by surface appearances that pertain to cities and towns. Importance is often confused with population or
de jure
factors. Washington, D.C., for example, is the capital of the United States, and many observers, especially foreign observers, have come to speak of America as “Washington,” an error that may explain many a diplomatic gaffe. An observer who would know the true state of things must rely on more subtle indicators. He must look at the map, for example, and note that cartographers habitually build a dimension beyond latitude and longitude into their charts; they grade roads according to their surface and size, a fair indicator of importance of the towns which those roads connect. They also provide graphic indications of the size of cities, from large, sprawling masses for cities of size to tiny open circles for towns of none. (This is not a fact lost on those who inhabit truly minor towns—they speak continuously of getting their hamlet on the map.) But even these indirect indicators can lead one astray, and to truly judge the impact of a given area on a total society, one must look at the lines of communication: the number of major highways, the number and size of airports, the number of AM radio stations (FM stations, because of their frequency, being limited in range), the national circulation of the newspapers. Perhaps the best indicator of regional importance is provided by the telephone company: the greater the importance of a locale, the smaller the number of digits that are required to dial beyond it. From the city of New York, one can dial any point in the continental United States by using only ten digits. In the city of Philadelphia, which is of slightly lesser importance, one must prefix those ten digits with an additional “1.” From the County, the process of dialing long distance is interminable. In order to call Judith I dialed area code and local number, prefixing it all with a four-digit “direct distance dialing number,” a total of fourteen digits. I reached a machine.

“This is Judith Powell. I’m not in at the moment. If this is a medical emergency, please dial—”

I hung up, then dialed my number and let it ring three times before hanging up. I glanced at my watch, and waited, shifting uneasily on the stool that sat in front of my mother’s vanity table in what she called the “powder room” and what anybody else would have called a closet. The vanity was an ancient stand of some cheap wood, the top of it fringed with pleated cotton material in a nondescript print which hung to the floor. The top itself was a slab of wood covered over by a slab of glass made permanently greasy by nearly three decades’ residue of Dixie Peach hair pomade. Sandwiched between, barely visible through the smeared glass, were pictures. Old pictures, tiny black-and-white things gone brown with age and dim with grease, dead images of dead people. Bill, dressed in white shorts, standing beside the stone barbecue pit Moses Washington had built in slow stages over a summer. The last summer. Bill and I had both hated that barbecue pit. It was, to us, a symbol of the total power of the adult over the child, of Moses Washington over all of us. We would be playing, or reading—I devouring a book while Bill gobbled up a comic which portrayed the latest adventures of Sergeant Rock and Easy Company—when suddenly Moses Washington would come storming down from the attic, angry beyond words, grasp us firmly by the scruff of the neck, and haul us out into the yard to help him—by watching, mostly—while he vented his fury by building an edifice of stone and mortar. He would, it seemed, invent tasks for us—finding the perfect triangular rock from the pile of triangular rocks that he had amassed, holding a trowel while he grunted it into place, searching amidst a mound of smaller stones for a pebble with which to shore it up. His face would be cloudy, clotted, and he would work with a sweating fury that would abate only as the rocks were hefted and placed and cemented. When the sweat poured off of him and he was quite calm, he would return to the attic, but we would know that he could emerge again at any moment. Two years after his death, while Bill tended the garden, I had puzzled out the formula for nitroglycerin, had rigged an electric detonator, and, luckily not killing myself with my own ignorance, I had blown that barbecue to kingdom come. One minute.

Another picture: Moses Washington dressed as he always dressed, bib overalls and a khaki work shirt, a squashed-down cap pulled down over one eye, leaning on a broom beside the church. I wondered when that one had been taken, exactly—after the job of church-cleaning had become indisputably his or earlier, while he and the WH&FMS had been contesting the point in a series of marathon battles that had culminated in his slinging a two-hundred-and-thirty-eight-pound matron through a stained-glass window, and then calmly sweeping up the glass. Two minutes.

And me. I was there too, in a pose for once truly natural: sitting in the big overstuffed chair beneath the floor lamp in the living room, dwarfed by the chair and the book that I held in both hands, propped on my knees. Three minutes.

I dialed the fourteen digits that would get my voice out of there. She answered on the first ring.

“You,” she mumbled.

“In bed already?” I said.

“ ’Mergency. Up late. John?”

“What?”

“I’m sorry.”

“He was old,” I said.

She didn’t say anything.

“The funeral’s Wednesday,” I said. “I’ll be back after that.”

She didn’t say anything, and I sat there listening to the sounds the telephone was making. I wished she would say something. She did finally.

“I could drive up there,” she said.

“What about the hospital?” I said.

“I already told them I might need somebody to cover for me for a few days.”

I didn’t say anything.

“John?” she said.

“No.”

She didn’t say anything.

“The roads are bad,” I said. “There was a snowstorm, and the roads are bad.”